This Is How I Find Her

by Sara Polsky

  —

  In the classroom I grab an easel from the cluster at the back of the room and set it up next to my seat. I rapidly paint thick black lines on the page, in no pattern whatsoever. I’m not trying to paint anything in particular. I’m just trying not to think about James watching me and then following me through the hall. Why is he suddenly so intent on talking to me? He didn’t really answer my question, and part of me wants to chase after him and ask again. What, what, what?

  After a few minutes, I stop the frantic movement of my paintbrush and stare at what I’ve done, tilting my head. My body is still buzzing, so I close my eyes and force myself to think only about what I can make out of this random jumble of lines. When something comes, I move my brush toward the page and begin to paint.

  Which is when Natalie appears next to my table, photos in hand, on her way to talk to Ms. Triste.

  “Hey,” she says, stopping in front of my easel. She looks at the lines, crinkling her forehead. After a moment she nods, not saying anything about what a giant mess the painting is right now. I appreciate it.

  “Listen,” she says. “My boyfriend is going to be here after school. Can you come out with us? I could use your help with something.”

  Me? Even though we’ve been hanging out the past few days, my first impulse is still to ask Natalie why. Why me when she could ask one of her other friends, when her boyfriend is coming all the way here from the city?

  But I catch myself before I ask her. Because I do want to go out with them, to do pretty much anything that isn’t sitting in Aunt Cynthia’s guest room, pretending to do my homework while I wait for visiting hours at the hospital.

  When I look over, Natalie is still staring at my easel, her head tilted to the right. She doesn’t look at me, but when I say okay, she smiles, and her fingers squeeze the top corner of my easel as she leaves.

  —

  This time I stand on the other side of Natalie’s locker door, looking at the photos and postcards and notes. There’s a theme to the way she decorated her locker, black and white postcards of bridges and beaches, and sepia-toned photos of women in long, cumbersome dresses. I’ll have to ask Uncle John to show her the old photos of the Carters’ house.

  My eyes find one spot of color in the corner, a photo of Natalie with Claire and a tall man who I decide must be her father. He and Claire are standing on either side of Natalie, arms around her shoulders, all three of them smiling and wearing dressy clothes. A younger girl, who must be Natalie’s sister, stands on their father’s other side, wearing a velvet dress with a bow. But the photo is tucked away behind a postcard, as if Natalie wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.

  The photo in the center of the locker is black and white, not color, but I recognize Natalie in it. She’s sitting on a bed, behind a tall, thin boy in a button-down shirt. She has one arm around his neck, and his head is turned slightly behind him, like he’s about to talk to her. I know without asking that he must be her boyfriend, but he doesn’t look the way I imagined. No headphones or weird T-shirt.

  Natalie shuts the locker and stands up, and I’m staring at air where the pictures were. Natalie’s bag looks nearly empty again, but she took her camera out of her locker, and she holds it against her body with one arm.

  “Ready?” she asks.

  We walk together down the hall, past clusters of other people packing up for the day. We’re nearly at the door when Natalie says, “Hey, isn’t that—”

  I look up. James is standing there.

  And he’s talking to Leila and a girl with white-blond hair who I assume must be Leila’s friend Liz, the one she promised to drive home.

  I resist the urge to stomp my foot. Somehow, Leila and James always manage to be where I least want to run into them. And then I have to ignore the swooping thing that happens in my stomach whenever I look over to where James is standing.

  I’m trying to think of something to say to Natalie—to remind her that nothing is going on—when I realize she’s already walking across the hall, straight to James. Leila and Liz have already turned away, but James sees me before I can get Natalie’s attention.

  “Hey, Sophie,” he says. I stop walking. I realize after a minute of awkward silence that Natalie’s stopped too and that I guess I should introduce them.

  “Um,” I start. “This is Natalie.” I wave a hand at her. “Natalie, this is James.”

  I don’t know whether to use the words my friend for either of them, so I leave them out.

  “We were just going…” and I trail off, realizing I have no idea where we’re going. I’m leaning toward the door, trying to communicate to Natalie how urgently I want to go, but she’s not taking the hint.

  “Actually,” she says, looking at James, “are you doing anything right now? We could use one more person.” She’s totally direct, like this is a normal thing to ask a complete stranger.

  I stare at her. What is she doing? I don’t even know why she needs my help, let alone the help of a third person she’s never even met.

  But James gives me a quick look and agrees, and soon he and I are following Natalie out to her car. We’re waiting, next to each other and not talking, while Natalie moves her boxes and hanger and tripod out of the backseat. We’re climbing in, me in the front seat, which I’ve pulled up slightly for James’s long legs, and James in the back. Then we’re lining up behind the other cars for the crawl out of the parking lot, James asking Natalie about how we know each other and what classes she’s taking. At first, Natalie hardly answers, but the more questions James asks, the more animated she gets, the same way she did when I asked about her photos. I stay quiet, but I listen, feeling hyper-aware of everything.

  —

  I had no idea where Natalie was taking us, and I especially wasn’t expecting the Carters’ plot of land, the rundown house. The building looks the same, droopy and mysterious, but for now the tall table in front of it is empty. There’s no one around, from Uncle John’s office or otherwise.

  James unfolds himself from the backseat, but Natalie waits a moment before turning off the car, so I stay where I am too. She leans over the gearshift and nudges her chin in James’s direction.

  “Just go for it,” she says. “Seriously.”

  “I don’t—” I start to protest, but Natalie just looks at me and shakes her head, like I shouldn’t even bother trying to pretend I don’t think James is cute. It’s the kind of conversation I was imagining this morning, a version of the conversations eleven-year-old Leila and I used to have.

  I follow Natalie around to the back of the car. There’s an even more random sampling of things in her trunk than in her backseat. I spot a few cans of paint, a single boot, and at least five cardboard boxes.

  She hands two of them to James and me and nods toward the house. Whatever’s inside rattles and clanks as we carry the cartons.

  “Chain mail?” James guesses.

  “Tambourines?” I suggest. We shake our boxes in unison, and James does a silly jumping dance move with his. I laugh.

  We keep thinking of possible items in Natalie’s boxes until we get back to where Natalie’s standing with the boy I saw in her locker photo, who’s holding the handlebars of his bicycle. He leans down to kiss her, and I look away, but not before I see how comfortable they are together.

  “This is Zach,” Natalie says, and we all start talking over ourselves as we introduce one another.

  We take the last of the boxes from the trunk and Natalie, now with her camera around her neck, leads the way to the house again. But instead of stopping at the doorway, where James and I left the other two boxes, she steps up onto the rickety porch. She takes another step and another, and then she’s inside the house. The wood dips and creaks in the places she’s walked.

  “Are you sure we should go in there?” I call. “It doesn’t seem totally stable.” And Uncle John and Claire
would never want us to be in here.

  “Don’t worry,” Natalie shouts back from somewhere in the house. “It’s fine in here.”

  And I realize she must have gone inside before, maybe the other day after I left.

  No one else objects, so I follow James and Zach into the house, shushing the mental voice that tells me this is the kind of thing my mother would do.

  Natalie’s right, mostly. There are some broken beams and piles of shattered window glass, but as we tiptoe in, the floor stays solid under us.

  Natalie tells us how she wants it all set up, and we move through the house, still testing the floorboards in each new room. I end up in the living room with Zach, unfolding a rug and laying out a toy train track while he sets out a photo in a frame and tapes a curtain-like piece of cream-colored fabric to the window frame. The fake curtain flutters when a breeze blows through the broken window, and the effect is spooky.

  As we work, Zach tells me how he and Natalie met: at a summer arts program, where he was writing and she was taking photos.

  “He asked me to illustrate one of his stories,” Natalie says, walking into the room. “I didn’t realize no one else had their stories illustrated, and it was just a ploy to hang out.”

  Zach laughs. “You did fall for it.”

  James, standing in the doorway behind Natalie, looks at me over the top of her head, a faint smile on his face, and my stomach goes weird again, like I lost a breath between my nose and my lungs. I wonder if Natalie said anything to him about our conversation in the car.

  Before I can come up with something, anything, to say, Natalie starts directing us around the room. We stand just on the other side of the doorway while she snaps pictures of the props. Then she adds us to the scene: Zach in the kitchen, holding a frying pan and spatula over the rusted stove; James and me in the living room, driving the wooden train around the track on the rug. I feel eight years old again as we crouch there, attaching the train cars with magnets.

  “This feels like what we used to do when we were little,” James says.

  “That’s what I was thinking,” I tell him. Natalie’s camera clicks just as I look up at him. I want to grab it and look at the picture so I can know the expression on my own face.

  “If Leila were here, she would have made up a whole story about what the trains are doing,” James adds.

  “And told us exactly how we should be moving them around,” I finish. We smile ruefully at each other, and again I feel like James is on my side, two against one.

  “Keep talking!” Natalie calls to us as she moves around the room, getting each of us from every possible angle. She seems happier here, and I think of how good her photos of the house were once she remembered that she cared. Right now she’s totally focused on how she wants this to work.

  And somehow James and I do keep talking, as he tells me about the band that he and Leila are in with some friends and the songs they’re prepping for a battle of the bands next month, about the summer he spent working at his mom and Aunt Cynthia’s law office.

  I try to ask questions and say mhmm at normal points in the conversation. I don’t say anything about my mother, about why I’m living at Leila’s house now, about how I spent my summer, about working at Uncle John’s office. I just hope James listens to what I am saying and doesn’t notice what I’m not.

  Finally Natalie finishes her photo shoot, and as we pack everything back into the boxes, she explains to us what the whole thing was about.

  “I have some photos in a show at the arts center next month,” she says. “But I wasn’t happy with them anymore. It didn’t seem like they represented any of the things I was trying to say. So I decided to put together some new work to show.”

  She clears her throat and looks around at the house. “I was thinking about what home means, and what happens when people’s homes shift around them.”

  I think of all the versions of this house I’ve already seen, in the old photos and my sketch and Natalie’s two sets of pictures.

  “Anyway, this is what I came up with.” She sort of shrugs, not looking at any of us.

  “It’s really cool,” Zach says, and I can tell from his expression—which I wish Natalie would look up to see—just how much he means it.

  —

  Natalie drops Zach off at the train first.

  “I’ll talk to you later,” Natalie says softly to him as he gets out of the car. She seems gentler around him, less on edge, and I smile, watching them from the backseat. Then I blush, remembering that James is watching them too.

  Zach grabs his bike from the trunk and then leans in to say good-bye to us through the back windows. When he tells me how nice it was to meet me, I say it back automatically, politely, before I realize I genuinely mean it.

  I expect James to move to the front so he can stretch his legs. But instead he stays in the back next to me, his arm resting along the top of the seat. I think again of all the things I haven’t said to him, about everything that’s going on with me, and then I tell my brain to stop. Instead I let myself be aware of his arm on the seat, the way he’s leaning just slightly toward me, until we get to his house. It feels nice.

  And then it’s just Natalie and me in the car, and rather than asking me for directions to Uncle John and Aunt Cynthia’s house, she asks, “Do you need to go home yet?”

  “No.” I don’t think anyone there really keeps track of where I am.

  “Good,” Natalie says, turning into town. “Do you want to come over?”

  She waits for a light and then turns again, into the parking lot of the pharmacy. “I just need to pick something up first.”

  “Okay.” I follow her out of the car, taking my wallet, even though there’s barely any money in it.

  Natalie heads for the hair products aisle and crouches down, searching for something on the lowest shelf. When she stands up, she’s holding two boxes of dye, one the same bright blue she has in her hair and another of neon pink.

  “For my sister,” she says, waving the pink box. Then she looks at me, tilting her head like she’s setting up a photograph without her camera. She reaches down again, pulling a box of purple dye off the shelf.

  “This one would work for you,” she says. She turns it toward me. “What do you think?”

  I study the photo. The color is dark, less noticeable than the blue or the pink. But it would be obvious in bright light, bold and new.

  I hold out my hand for the box.

  But the line at the front of the store is long, and the wait feels even longer after a woman with a crying baby and a full basket reaches the counter, slowing everything up.

  Natalie turns toward the back of the store. “Let’s try the pharmacy counter instead.”

  So we march back through the aisles to the pharmacy, where there are only four people ahead of us in line.

  Three people.

  Two people.

  One person.

  And then, when the man at the counter leans over to sign his receipt, I see the pharmacist who’s working today, and I realize I know him. He’s been giving me my mother’s prescriptions every Friday for two years.

  I’m frozen, staring at him, wondering how I could have forgotten that this is the pharmacy where I always pick up my mother’s pills. Then I try to shift behind Natalie, so he can help her first and she won’t hear the pharmacist ask about my mother. But he sees me before I can move.

  “I have your prescription,” he says. “Last week’s too. I’ll be right back.”

  He turns into the shelves and I turn too, hoping there’s someone behind me I could pretend he was talking to. But Natalie and I are the only ones left in the line, and I can tell Natalie’s looking at me, probably wanting to know more.

  I think fast, wondering if I can explain why the pharmacist recognizes me and what prescription he’s talking about without
actually telling her anything. But I don’t see a way.

  I set my box of purple hair dye down on the counter.

  “I have to go,” I tell Natalie, still not looking at her.

  And then I walk as quickly as I can out of the store. I hit Natalie’s car door three times, right next to the handle, and pull my backpack from the floor of the front seat. Then I pull my bag on and walk back the way we drove, through town and past the train station and toward Leila’s house, even though no one is waiting for me.

  Fifteen

  I’m glad my locker is a few hallways away from Natalie’s, because the next day, when I slide down in front of it to eat my lunch, I don’t have to worry that she’ll walk by when I don’t want to see her.

  When I got back to Aunt Cynthia and Uncle John’s house last night, hurrying up the stairs to avoid everyone, I found a message on my phone from Dr. Choi’s office, asking me to meet with him this afternoon. This is a message for Sophie Canon. Dr. Choi would like to discuss Amy’s treatment plan. Another reminder that I had stopped thinking about her for one afternoon.

  Now, once again, she fills my thoughts despite all my attempts to distract myself. I try to sink into the familiar rhythms of my lunch period, tuning out the sounds of lockers slamming on either side of me. I chew my sandwich absentmindedly as I fly through the equations I was supposed to balance for chemistry class today. I have half an hour to get through them all and review my notes in case there’s a pop quiz.

  But when I finish the problem set and look back over my work, I don’t even need my calculator to see the page is covered with careless errors, reactants I forgot to multiply and elements I didn’t balance. For once, I give up on the assignment before lunch ends. I slam the book shut, leaving the sheet of messy equations inside, now with a crease probably slanted across the page. I stare at the floor, suddenly noticing how many of the feet that pass me are in clusters while I sit here by myself.

  And when I open my locker, looking for something else to do, all I can see is the inside of the door, empty of photos or postcards or reminder notes or even one of those small magnetic mirrors. If I hadn’t just used my own combination on the lock, I would have no idea the few books piled inside belong to me at all.